To be fair, I see and understand a lot of your arguments but they aren't convincing enough to label viacoin as a pump and dump scheme (at least by intention).
I even wrote that Viacoin started out a legit project but has turned into such a coin, just out of its evolution.
I totally agree with everything you have said.
I think that it was valuable that someone did do a code audit on how far viacoin has diverged from bitcoin and the pros and cons of the changes. At least this sticks to the principle of investing in the tech you know and believe in.
I definitely think that being a 1 man dev team here with kinda lacking(bad but in this case good) marketing, this coin is not positioning itself to be a pump and dump coin still.
The work romano has done also can't be said to be trivial since not just any dev can jump into a project like this and be able to segwit it on their own and get other protocols working.
The harder question is how much this type of work is valued at and is any of the crypto currencies out there really worth any of the market cap that they have. This is almost all speculation at this point still and there is no right and wrong here.
I really do think that any community (especially crypto) these days should at least be open for people with strong opinions (especially willingness to be wrong) to come in and say their opinions and ask some questions. I love the excitement and love for viacoin but being overly defensible and sensitive to negative opinion would also hurt the coin's image.